Engineer 1 – AI Agentic Solutions

Jobtailor; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Nordstrom is seeking an junior software engineer focused on AI applications and agentic solutions. You will implement componentry under senior guidance, learn context engineering, and contribute to evaluation scripts, instrumentation, and secure practices.

You will collaborate with engineering, product, and business teams to align your work with broader retail technology goals and data privacy requirements.

Qualifications

• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience (internships count).
• Hands-on exposure to LLMs or foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.).
• Genuine curiosity about agentic AI and tool usage to build production skills.
• Solid CS fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, and OO design — plus RESTful APIs knowledge.
• Basic understanding of software testing practices and Git version control.
• Willingness to learn modern agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or Claude Agent SDK.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and collaborative mindset.
• Experience with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or vector databases.
• Exposure to AWS or GCP cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with Docker and CI/CD basics.
• Interest or coursework in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain problem spaces.
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or personal experimentation with LLM apps.

Responsibilities

• Implement individual components of agentic solutions — tool integrations, prompt templates, retrieval steps — under the direction of senior engineers, writing clean, well-tested code and documenting your work clearly.
• Learn how the team applies context engineering and actively seek knowledge of LLMs and agentic frameworks to apply to your work.
• Help build and run evaluation scripts and offline benchmarks to check agent behavior for safety, accuracy, and reliability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and design reviews, learning to debug issues and surface trade-offs on the components you own.
• Add basic instrumentation — logging, metrics, alerts — following Nordstrom's engineering and security standards, including secure handling of data.
• Collaborate with teammates across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to understand how your work fits into the larger solution.

Skills

AI Fluency

Agentic AI

REST APIs

Data Structures

Git

CI/CD

Cloud Platforms

Prompt Engineering

RAG

Open-source

Tools

Docker

AWS

GCP

LangGraph

Semantic Kernel

Claude Agent SDK

Job description

• Implement individual components of agentic solutions — tool integrations, prompt templates, retrieval steps — under the direction of senior engineers, writing clean, well-tested code and documenting your work clearly.
• Learn how the team applies context engineering — what an agent sees, when, and why — and actively seek out knowledge of LLMs, agentic frameworks, and prompt engineering to apply to your work.
• Help build and run evaluation scripts and offline benchmarks to check that agent behavior is safe, accurate, and reliable.
• Participate in on-call rotations and design reviews, learning to debug issues and surface trade-offs on the specific functions or components you own.
• Add basic instrumentation — logging, metrics, alerts — to the systems you build, and follow Nordstrom's engineering and security standards, including secure handling of sensitive data.
• Collaborate with teammates across engineering, product, and business stakeholders to understand how your work fits into the larger solution.

Requirements

• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience (internships count), or a relevant certification (e.g. bootcamp).
• AI Fluency — Required: Some hands-on exposure to LLMs or foundation model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.), whether through coursework, projects, internships, or professional experience.
• Genuine curiosity about agentic AI — how agents use tools, retrieve context, and take actions — and a desire to build production skills in this space.
• Solid CS fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented design — along with familiarity with RESTful APIs, JSON, and how services communicate with one another.
• Basic understanding of software testing practices and version control (e.g. Git).
• Willingness to learn modern agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or the Claude Agent SDK.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, and a collaborative, feedback-seeking mindset.
• Coursework, personal projects, or internship experience involving prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or vector databases.
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker) and CI/CD basics.
• Interest or coursework in retail, e-commerce, or supply chain problem spaces.
• Any contributions to open-source AI projects or personal experimentation with LLM applications.

Core Competencies

Demonstrates proficiency in software engineering with a focus on AI applications, including hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic frameworks. Capable of implementing robust solutions while adhering to engineering standards and collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams.